Atlas's Bones: The African Foundations of Europe

A major new look at Africa's influence on European culture and how colonization remade Africa in the image of a medieval Europe. Virgil. Chaucer. Petrarch. These names resonate with many as cornerstones of European culture. Yet, in Atlas's Bones, D. Vance Smith reveals that much of what is claimed as European culture up to the Middle Ages—its great themes in literature, its sources in political thought, its religious beliefs—originated in the writings of African thinkers like Augustine, Fulgentius, and Martianus Capella, or Europeans who thought extensively about Africa. In fact, a third of Virgil's Aeneid takes place in Africa. Francis Petrarch believed his most important achievement was his epic Africa; while Geoffrey Chaucer wrote repeatedly about the figures of Scipio Africanus, actually two different men who defeated and destroyed Carthage. Smith tells the story of how Europe created a false "medieval" version of Africa to acquire resources and power during the era of imperialism and colonialism. The first half of the book, "Reading Africa," traces Egypt's, Libya's, and Carthage's influence on classical and medieval thinking about Africa, highlighting often ignored literary and legendary traditions, for example, that Alexander the Great named himself the son of an African god. The second part, "Writing Africa," focuses on how the different cultures of the two great African cities—Carthage and Alexandria—shaped modern literary criticism and political theology and examines the cross-influences of modern anthropology, medieval studies, and colonial law. Atlas's Bones firmly re-establishes the significance of Africa in European intellectual history. It will be essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how much of Africa informs our artistic and cultural world.

Table of Contents:
Preface: An Atlas for This Book Introduction African History and White Noise  1 “Africa,” the Fallout of Metonymy  00 All of Africa  00 I. Ancient and Medieval: Reading Africa Chapter One. Egypt, the Exception    Africa, the Continent  00    Alexander the Great African  00    The Libyan God of Europe  00    The Fluid Land  00    Egypt in Medieval Europe  00    Moses the African  00    Alexander’s African Romance  00    Egyptology’s History of Europe  00    Egypt Theory  00 Chapter Two. Africa, Fulcrum of Epic    Mythic Landing: The Iliad, the Argonautica, the Pharsalia, the Aeneid  00    Britain’s African Foundations: Geoffrey of Monmouth  00    The African Invention of England  00 Chapter Three. The Specter of Carthage    Carthage the Symptom: Virgil, Silius Italicus, Horace, Freud  00    Carthage and African Identities: Sallust, Tertullian, Augustine  00    Augustine’s Scandalous Carthaginian Theory  00    The Dream of Scipio Africanus: Cicero and Macrobius  00    Petrarch’s Modern Africa  00    Chaucer and the African  00 Chapter Four. Ghosts of Language: Punic, Lybic, African Myth    The African Tumor in Language  00    Martianus Capella: In the Palace of Myth  00    Fulgentius: Africa’s Mythic Language  00    Libyc, the Purest Language  00    The Symbolic Violence of Lost Languages: Bourdieu  00    Our Most Secret Writing: Assia Djebar  00 II. Medieval and Modern: Writing Africa Chapter Five. Allegory of Two African Cities    Auerbach in Alexandria  00    Auerbach in Carthage  00 Chapter Six. The King’s African Bodies    Kantorowicz’s African Body  00    Mystical Kings, European and African  00    Anthropology’s Divine Kings and Colonial Rule: Leo Frobenius and Max Gluckman  00 Chapter Seven. Kenya’s Medieval Charter    The Feudal Metaphor  00    Medieval Land Law in Africa  00    How Oxford Medievalists Ruled the World  00    Independent Feudalism  00    Kenyatta and Malinowski Imagine Land  00    Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: Land before Time  00 Chapter Eight Fanon Outside History: Manicheism, Augustine, and Hegel    Which Manicheism?  00    Manicheism and Dialectic  00    Struggling with Augustine, Then and Now  00 Chapter Nine Zimbabwe and the Fear of the Medieval    The Specter of Carthage, Again  00    Picturesque Archaeology  00    Barbarian Invasions: Rhodes’s Gibbon  00    The Inconvenience of the Medieval  00 Coda The New Divine Kings Acknowledgments Notes Index

About the Author :
D. Vance Smith is professor of English and former director of medieval studies at Princeton University. His many books include Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Review :
“A fascinating exploration of the place of Africa and Africans in the intellectual life of classical Europe, its later erasure, and some of the consequences in the making of the cultures of Empire.” “Smith finds that medieval European literature relies on knowledge of a real (not just a mythic) Africa and writings by Africans, and his invitation to reorient our understanding of the relationship between continents is both provocative and persuasive. His compelling challenge to the use of a false ‘medieval’ to support racial hierarchies and conquest is important for historians, literary scholars, and everyone seeking to better understand the world as it was and as it is.” “This brilliant book affirms that Africa has never been alien to Europe. European self-understanding has always depended upon its southern neighbor, and yet Europe has regarded Africa as a place perennially medieval, in need of neo-feudal law, and incapable of comprehending modernity. Smith expertly guides us through this tangled web of mutual indebtedness and pseudo-feudal mystification. A landmark achievement.” “We live in an exciting historical moment in medievalist scholarship. While two decades ago Euromedievalists hardly noticed the vast world outside Latin Christendom, an increasing number of scholarly studies today are unearthing the crucial debts that Euromedieval literature, history, and thought owe to Afro-Asian worlds. Atlas’s Bones, in particular, treating literary history, philosophy, and medievalism through nine expansive chapters, will surely be one of the new studies that will be read for a long time.”